


a nativity story

by Wildehack (tyleet)



Series: punchworld [1]
Category: Dungeons & Dragons - All Media Types, The Punchlines
Genre: Catholicism, Gen, Tieflings, cannibalism natch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-15
Updated: 2018-02-15
Packaged: 2019-03-19 05:37:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13697946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tyleet/pseuds/Wildehack
Summary: He’s not a demon, or he’s not entirely a demon.





	a nativity story

**Author's Note:**

> More fic for my character's backstory. It isn't the first time, and it won't be the last.
> 
> Things to know:
> 
> The Universal Faith is a religious empire not at all unlike the Renaissance Catholic church. The big difference: a woman called Elís is their messiah, and the church does not differentiate between genders. There are male and female priests; nuns are not a thing. Celibacy is still a thing for priests, tho.
> 
> Tieflings in our homebrewed world biologically require the flesh of sapient beings to live, because demons are assholes. The Universal Faith does not consider them people--they are demons without souls.
> 
> Casimir is half-human, half-Tiefling, orphaned as a baby, raised by monks. He gets his daily dose of human flesh by attending mass, via the power of literal magical transubstantiation (this is my bread you eat, this is my body you drink.) When he was a baby, he fulfilled this requirement by drinking mother's milk.

******A Nativity Story**

Long ago, when the elves were young, Moira, most blessed among women, was chosen by the holy spirit to bear the Beloved of God. 

Moira, a virgin who was never married, conceived the Holy Child at God’s Word, as was written in the scriptures, and expected by the prophets. 

Moira’s father, lacking in faith, cast her out. Moira wandered the Holy City, looking for somewhere to have her child, but all the doors were shut. 

Finally the Evening Star shone down from above, and Moira followed its light to an empty boathouse. Under the light of the Evenstar she was delivered of the Living Goddess, Elís the Anointed who delivered us from Evil, and who shall reign in the Holy Kingdom without end.  
  


**The Nativity Story According To Brother Luce**

It was Our Lady’s mercy that saved you.

It was Our Lady who sent the huntsman to your mother and shone the protection of Her Light down upon him, when he needed it most. Without Her intervention, Casimir, you would have been raised a monster, cold and soulless in the absence of Our Lady’s love. It was She that brought you to us, that prevented the huntsman from sending you to join your monstrous mother in Hell. She chose you, Casimir.

We took you in--only a few weeks old, but red as a devil, with an evil look about you--and gave you a name, a baptism. When Father Benicio dipped you in the water, it smoked and churned, and you howled like you were dying. We thought perhaps Elís didn’t want you after all--but you lived, and when the scabs fell away, your skin healed to a pale, human color. The Lady’s work. 

She saved you again when you were weaned. You sickened and nearly starved to death, no matter how we fed you. Father Giovanni even tried spooning you raw flesh, knowing that was how beasts ate, but it was to no avail. We thought perhaps it was the will of God. It wasn’t until Initiate Rodrigo--rest his soul--spilled the host, and you put a piece of our Lady’s body in your mouth, that we realized how deeply your mother’s taint ran in you. If Cardinal Valentín hadn’t given you special dispensation to eat of the host before receiving the official sacrament of communion, you would have wasted away from hunger before you could speak your first prayer. 

Her generosity, Casimir. The Lady’s generosity, and happy coincidence. Those are the only reasons you’re alive today. 

Everything has its purpose, I suppose.    
  


**A Passion Play**   


In  a well-appointed cave system in the Remagnan Mountains, there was the village of Azazel’s Shade, home to some fifteen families. It was small, to be sure, but nicely situated: close enough to human cities that the hunting was good, far enough away that they were unlikely to be mobbed, and only a few miles from the coast, so travelers sometimes passed by on their way to Rema. Moira Belacqua had lived there all her life, in perfect comfort. 

Moira was an only child, and everything a parent could wish for. She was healthy, happy, and obedient. The trouble didn’t start until she was older.

As a child, Moira had a perfectly ordinary relationship with prey: she made her parents good-luck tokens to take on hunts, danced at the feasts, helped her father clean the carcasses and helped her mother grind the offal into sausages. She used to beg her mother to make braised heart for weddings and Candlenights. The private tutor who taught her as a child certainly only told her what was right and proper: that although humans were capable of a rudimentary kind of speech and thought, they were at best wild animals, liable to turn on a civilized person at any moment. Although a soft-hearted Tiefling or Drow might keep a human or two as a pet, or forge a kind of friendship with one in the wild, it was a mistake to think that a human was ever  _ domesticated _ . A beast is still a beast, no matter how you love it. (Her father would blame himself later for telling young Moira that individual humans could still be majestic creatures. Her mother would lay the blame firmly on Moira’s favorite fairytale,  in which a Tiefling prince and all his servants were cursed to live like humans until he found true love’s first kiss.) 

It started going wrong when Moira was a teenager, and Baphomet the healer’s son came back from university, spouting all kinds of ideas. Moira changed. She grew sullen and defiant, showed less respect for her elders than was owed, refused to join in the hunts, started writing poetry and going to Baphomet’s late-night philosophical salons. She peppered her parents with questions: did they know the meat Kairos traded in town came from a human farm, where the humans were all terribly mistreated? Did they know some of those humans were kept in cages from birth until death, never allowed to see the moon or the stars or run free on the grass? That some of them were _ force-fed  _ fattening foods, so the meat would taste sweeter? Moira ate less and less at meals, until she was thin as a shadow. Her parents despaired. The priestess tried to speak with her, but Moira wouldn’t listen--instead she gave the priestess a copy of Alighieri’s Sonnets, and asked her to read them. (“The hand that penned those lines belongs to a  _ person _ ,” Moira insisted passionately. “Just the same as you and I.”) 

When Moira was eighteen, all her parents’ fears came true. A group of young people self-styling themselves as radical poet philosophers--the corrupt Baphomet, Lix the blacksmith’s girl, Raum Abaddon’s youngest, and Moira--set off from Azazel’s Shade, in search of a better way. Moira’s mother was hysterical when she discovered Moira gone, the manifesto her daughter left pinned to her pillow doing nothing to allay her fears. ( _ We will not hunt,  _ Moira wrote.  _ We believe in hope, and we believe in love. We believe in poetry. We will not return until we make the world anew. _ ) 

Moira never came home.    
  


**The story Casimir tells himself**

So, his mother was a monster. He’s seen pictures of monsters like his mother: skin red as blood, horns jutting proudly forth, spiked tails curled threateningly behind them,  and eyes hideously dark, sclera and all. But his father was a man. 

There’s a mirror in the Abbot’s anteroom. Whenever he can, the child Casimir steals away to stand in front of the mirror, solemnly examining himself: his pink skin, his smooth forehead, his human eyes. He’s not a demon, or he’s not entirely a demon. His father  _ must _ have been a man.    
  
That means there is good in him, as well as evil. That means he has a soul, or half a soul. If he strives his hardest, it means he might go to Heaven when he dies.    
  
Casimir doesn’t like thinking the next part, even as a child. But he looks into his eyes--brown, Reman, ordinary eyes--and can never help himself from thinking that his father would have loved him.   
  


**A Passion Play According to Lix**

She fell in love. Or something like love--we were all so young. She was _ stupidly _ young--nineteen if she was a day. I don’t remember the human’s name--Leonardo, or Lorenzo, or something like that. He never seemed like anything special to me, but Moira was crazy about him. We were living off corpses then--raiding fresh-turned earth in graveyards, and praying the body wouldn’t be diseased--and he was apprenticed to a doctor. He’d tip us off about new graves, violent deaths, that sort of thing. 

He may have written poems. Moira loved her poetry. She wrote poems about him, _ that’s _ for sure--pages and pages of it. The baby took us all by surprise. Even Baphomet wasn’t quite sure what to think, you know. We wanted to change the world, but we didn’t know what mixing blood like that would  _ do _ to a baby. Had it ever been done before? We’d all heard stories, but none of us had  _ met _ one. The apprentice vanished sometime after that. Not prepared to be a father, or not prepared to father a freak. 

Moira and Raum decided to head back home. What we were doing was dangerous. We thought it was worth the risk, young and stupid as we were, but none of us wanted to bring a baby into it. Tieflings aren’t like humans, you know--breeding like rabbits. We treasure children. 

I don’t know what happened after that. Only that they never made it back, and a few months later a Drow trader reported they’d seen Raum’s head on a spike outside the Vatican gates.  
  


**An Irony**

Now an adult, Casimir prays the rosary. The beads sting his hands, the crucifix burns him. He barely notices the pain--his hands are thick with scar tissue.    
  
He prays.    
  
_ Hail Moira, full of grace _

_ Blesséd art thou among women _ _   
_ _ And blesséd is the fruit of thy womb,  _

_ Elís.  _ _   
_ _   
_ _ Holy Moira, mother _ _   
_ _ Of God _ _   
_ __ Pray for us sinners

_ Now and at the hour of our death _ _   
_ _ Amen.  _

 

**The Nativity according to Moira**

Her son is perfect. He is frighteningly small, with skin is red as a rose, and tiny warm fingers that curl and clutch at her hands and hair, some deep instinct telling her son to hold on tight. He has his father’s eyes. When he breathes in, his whole body expands. When he breathes out, his whole body contracts. It’s like holding a heart in her hands, his little body beating and beating. 

She names him Belial for her grandfather, Irini for her hope for him, and Belacqua for tradition. She loves him furiously, violently. She’d die for him. 

She does.    
  


**Author's Note:**

> I live at wildehack.tumblr.com, and the punchworld lives at punchworld.tumblr.com. Feedback is adored. :)


End file.
